Let’s Build a Zoo (PS5)

Product Information

You start as the manager of a brand-new zoo, and after a few tutorial screens you’re left with a blank canvas of land and the freedom to mould it any way you want. You start with two main ways to gain new animals: rescuing them from an independent shelter, or trading with other zoos across the globe. Eventually attendees come to see these animals, and your goal is to keep everybody happy and make tons of money along the way. Indie tycoon game Let's Build a Zoo will be making its way to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PS5 and Xbox via Game Pass on 29th September.

It feels really fast paced with the day to day too. There is a pause mechanic of course but to see if things work or not you get a small window of opportunity to make corrections and with all the systems running it just sorta made me feel incredibly anxious.With all that said, everything else is translated pretty well and makes the game relatively easy to play with an attempt to use as little buttons as possible trying not to convolute the controls. It’s a hard task but one I think Springloader has done creatively and intelligently. Dinosaur Island Expansion DLC Still, Let’s Build a Zoo’s comedic approach to zoo management belies just how deep it is. It isn’t perfect and I’d love a patch that halved the number of animals you need for splicing, but seeing your visitors gawp in wonder at your creations is worth the price of admission alone. The moral choices it throws at you, which aren’t all just for the sake of being evil, elevate it even further. If you’ve the slightest interest interest in sim games, you’ll have hour after hour of ethically-dubious fun with Let’s Build a Zoo. Watching these systems interact is when Let’s Build A Zoo is at its best, and playing around with them is encouraged by the addition of an in-game morality meter. You’re given multiple “critical choices” throughout the game that present some sort of moral dilemma. You’re often given only two decisions to choose from: one that benefits you in the short term but lowers your morality score, or a more charitable action that does little other than raise that same score.

Let’s Build A Zoo with Dinosaur Island DLCis available now on PlayStation 4 & 5 (reviewed on latter), Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Series S|X, and PC via Steam. If your animal splicing experiments are starting to feel a bit stale, there's some good news; park management sim Let's Build a Zoo is getting some aquarium-themed DLC later this year, opening up the potential for even more adorable/terrifying creature hybrids in your life. Let’s Build A Zoo is just as wonderful on console as it was on its initial release on PC. As with any building management simulator, some controls will never feel completely intuitive moving from mouse to controller, and Let’s Build A Zoo is no different, but only in minor areas. The Dinosaur Island DLC takes all the highlights from the base game and amplifies them in a fantastic addition to an already extremely enjoyable game. It's time to Build a Zoo! Construct and decorate enclosures, buy and breed animals, hire zookeepers and vets... then try your hand at DNA splicing, and stitch together over 300,000 different types of animal. This can only go smoothly... Carp-e diem! If you're looking for aquarium DLC for your favorite zoo management sim, you've come to the right plaice.

The Dinosaur DLC is a fantastic addition to an already great game and is much of the same set up as your original zoo. You can fly there while working on your current zoo, and with you you’ll take a small stipend to set things up. The different dinosaurs are discovered and gain entry to your zoo through a group of palaeontologists who you can pay to discover more variants of dinosaur. With 51 dinosaurs to discover and display in your zoo, there is a lot of digging to be done. From your favourite stegosaurus to extinct mammals like woolly mammoths. Visually, the game uses a 16-bit visual style and while we’re usually not huge fans of this, it’s the best way to convey all the visual info you need. We still maintain that the original Civilization is the best one because the 2D pixel visuals make everything clearer and that’s the case here. There’s an absolute torrent of visual information to deal with and so doing this in isometric 3D or full 3D wouldn’t have worked. And yeah, the music is a little annoying but this is more of a ‘put on a podcast’ kind of game anyway. Want to focus on conservation? Saving the planet? Farming? Going green? Going vegan? Stopping animals from going extinct? How about a focus on breeding every possible genome? Or perhaps you just want to keep the local transport system fully funded? There's so many different directions your zoo can take, and Let's Build a Zoo gives you the tools to pursue your specific goals. Let's Build A Zoo truly lets you go wild, with hundreds of animals to breed and import, tons of buildings, foliage, decorations and path types to spruce up your monkey business, and plenty of staff options for keeping your animals happy, and your guests entertained. With incredible fossil discoveries, over 50 new dinosaur species are now ready for you to adopt and showcase to your visitors! From Velociraptors to Sabertooths, so many favourites are available to take in, care for and splice with others! By adding dinosaurs to your zoo, you will have the ability to create more than 10 million animal variants in the sandbox mode - are you ready to make the world's first Capysaurus or Donkey-Ceratops!?

Experience Springloaded's Zoo management sim Let's Build A Zoo, alongside the newest DLC, Let's Build A Zoo: Dinosaur Island! So, Let’s Build a Zoo has no multiplayer modes. Still, if you do want to share your adventures in zookeeping, you can always stream or share footage of your playthroughs on YouTube or Twitch.

Not Just Another Zoo Sim!

Add to that hundreds of buildings, foliage, decorations, staff, guests and path types, and there are plenty of ways to really put your mark on your zoo. Developed by Springloaded and published by No More Robots, we finally have a console release of the ever-popular pixel-sim title, Let’s Build A Zoo. The game is available now across all platforms. Not Just Another Zoo Sim! Feel like running a zoo, populated with all manner of disturbing hybrids? Ever wonder if a rabbit would still be as cute if it had a snake’s head? At first we were trying to get established and then it became about being efficient. Some ten hours in, we wanted the PSC Zoo to be symmetrical. But then we wanted the enclosures to be bigger and grouped by type (you’ve got grass, concrete, desert, tropical, ice and so on for different types of animal) and so the entire layout started to change. We invested heavily in transport, upping our visitor numbers but also our CO2 usage. So then it was about researching bigger and better buses. And so on. The game lets you edit, move and redraw enclosures easily, so toying around with your layout becomes a constant thing.